I watched my story in multiple parts on The Second Road’s home page and felt like I’ve stripped naket in cyberspace.  I’ve shared my story in private and very public forums now for years, I’ve had the most inimate details published all over but haven’t experienced this before.  Now, my drug story is ”out there” memorialized on the internet. I can imagine now being held to a standard where every future deviation from the video version will be subject to criticism a la the author of “A Million Pieces”  I’ve no doubt offended many of the same traditional recovery stakeholders.  Any how, those are probably…

David Sedaris is one of my favorite writers and he’s written a fantastic essay about smoking in this month’s issue of the New Yorker.

“I recall seeing ashtrays in movie theatres and grocery stores, but they didn’t make me want to smoke. In fact, it was just the opposite. Once, I drove an embroidery needle into my mother’s carton of Winstons, over and over, as if it were a voodoo doll. She then beat me for twenty seconds, at which point she ran out of breath and stood there panting, “That’s . . . not . . . funny.”

Read the rest…

Jennifer Storm is the real-life voice of millions of girls and young women today who are growing up in a nightmarish vortex of addiction, abuse, despair, and spiraling self-destruction. Addicted to alcohol by age twelve, Storm now serves as Executive Director of the Victim/Witness Assistance Program in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In 2002 she was appointed commissioner to the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency. Jennifer Storm has appeared extensively on national television and has been profiled in Rolling Stone, Time, Central Penn Business Journal, and many other national and local publications. She is the author of Blackout Girl: Growing Up and…

My grandfather died before I got sober.  My grandfather died before I had a relationship with my father.  I managed to pull together a couple of days clean before I drove 300 miles to the funeral, but you know the toll addiction takes.  I was 40 pounds under weight.  My eyes were sunken in.  I was gray.  I did a lot of terrible things when I was still ‘out there’ but being a source of additional pain to my family at that difficult time made me burn with shame.

I was so happy to be sober the next summer when my…

etta--every day prior to 2 years, 4 months, 1 week, and 4 days ago:

I am not an alcoholic.

I am not an alcoholic. I only drink because I have depression. My problem is depression. I can stop. I stopped drinking for 10 years! The only reason I started again is because of the depression. Depression chased away my spouse, led to my illegal firing, caused the loss of almost every penny I had, and finally took my house! What the hell reason do I have not to drink? If you had the uncontrolled, suffocating, debilitating darkness of my life, you would drink, too! None of…

I’m ready to bed one hundred million dollars that my husband will be using again within 48 hours. He is boiling addict behavior all over the place. In a 5-minute phone conversation, he demanded that we let go of all the boundaries I’ve set (Let me use the car. I’m going away soon, just let me use it one time. I don’t feel like working today. Why don’t you call out for me and say that I have to go home to meet the repairman or something? I feel like lying on the couch and thinking about things. I don’t…

By Lee Stringer

Reviewed by Ginger B.

In the spring of 1985, Lee Stringer, through a series of self-imposed, fairly destructive life changing decisions, finds himself being evicted from his one room apartment, and “Half an hour later I’m on the street, clutching a voucher for all that remains of my worldly possessions. Only instead of feeling put out, I feel strangely relieved. Elated even. I have just been released, I realize, from all earthly claims upon me. …Off to the freedom of the streets! Off to whatever happens next.” The next two hundred pages or so are stories about “what happens…

Consequences really piss my husband off, I’ve noticed. Nothing makes him more furious than for me to observe that he has done something foolish in feeding his addiction…when he has pawned things that belong to me, the worst part of it for him is my noticing, finding out.

He is facing a big dose of consequence, the biggest he’s faced yet as a result of his behavior over the last year. It’s scaring him, and it’s making his mood foul. How dare the state notice that he hasn’t been fulfilling his obligations? How dare there be consequences for spending a year…

Like a lot of us, I have this astonishing history of making exactly the wrong choice at the worst possible moment. It’s like I’m a prodigy at failure. Even more baffling is that in so many respects I’m a pretty bright guy. People close to me agree that I’m probably the smartest really slow learner they know. Obviously they’ve never hung out with a bunch of other addicts and alcoholics because I’ve found in recovery that I am hardly unique. Many substance-dependent individuals appear to exhibit a decision-making impairment similar to that of patients who have suffered injury or disease of…

Have you ever gone to the grocery store and walked off without your change? Or your groceries? I have.

Have you ever gone through a fast-food drive through and paid for your meal and driven away? I have.

Have you ever been looking for something, like your keys, only to discover them in your hand? Or been looking for your glasses for like 15 minutes only to discover that they are on your face? I have. Seriously. I’m not joking. On my face!

Just now I was broiling a hamburger and pulled out a bottle of Worcestershire and immediately lost the cap. Brand…

I will not go as far as saying that I have had the worst luck of the draw, or the most difficult and saddest life ever. Many have had worse. Many have had better. Some have lived with little pain and grief. I recommend writing your own story. This kind of therapy is a powerful remedy to depression and sorrow.

My words I’m writing are not in competition with others–they’re only my own true words. My interest in writing the following story is to help people identify their own problems similar to mine. I hope it helps those who might feel…

by William Cope Moyers

My soon-to-be-16-year-old son, Henry, took the written exam for his driver’s permit this week. He didn’t pass. I shared his disappointment. And I admired his commitment to study harder for too much and got behind the wheel — it’s that simple. — Melissa W. in Atlanta

Dear Melissa: Your family’s tragedy will never disappear. Neither will the woman’s responsibility for causing it. What she did was wrong. But perhaps there is some good that can come from this. On a personal level, only you can decide if meeting with her is the right thing to do

.

I’m sure it…

by Courtney H.

My alcoholism sure has a way of sneaking up on me. Whether in highly paranoid thinking, depressive mood swings, or a strange desire to self destruct the moment God does not give me what I want, the disease can place an extremely sobering block on my road to serenity. The first time I became acutely aware of how sneaky alcoholic thinking can become, even in sobriety, happened on a sunny morning last year.

I felt pretty wonderful as I walked down a Charlottesville street with six months of sobriety under my belt. When a row of bars formed in…

Try really, really hard to be nice to people you don’t like. The more you don’t like them the farther you should be willing to go out of your way to be helpful to them. If someone is irritating to you, practice being patient with them. If someone makes you angry do everything you can to be loving toward them.

There is nothing altruistic or pure about this suggestion. I’m not going to feed you some line of crap about how it makes you a better person and makes you feel wonderful. It would probably be a lie. At least I’ve…

My husband seems determined to be a living example of the recovery dictum: Find recovery, or find jails, institutions, or death. I am afraid of the things that are happening in our lives, but I don’t know that anything short of being locked away is going to make him wake up to how much of his life he’s missing.

He is doing a good job of staying clean, if staying clean means not doing heroin. He hits a meeting about twice a week, and he frets a lot about how he’s wasting the limited amount of time he has. He has…

Courtney Hall moved to Charlottesville, VA, two years ago from upstate New York in search of warmer weather. She also found a loving and welcoming community where she has learned the fine art of sober living. When she isn’t working, Courtney can be found writing, playing outside, or enjoying the benefits of a membership in the AA fellowship. Look for her weekly blog in our “Young and Sober” feature.

I’ve mentioned before on my site that there was a time in my life where I was the drug user in my relationship. When we first met, my husband was clean. I wasn’t.

I am not sure, however, that I’ve explained the extent of my drug use. I was talking to MPJ last night about it, and wondering if I might not be (drumroll) a dry drug addict. If someone else told me my story, told me she’d gotten clean by moving away from the place where she was using, told me she was sure she’d never use again even though she never…

My dad is a scientist, a project manager at Yucca Mountain. It is his job to bury stuff forever; to insure it never sees the light of day and that it can never be pulled out and used to harm people. Kind of like what I tried to do by getting high. I took the problems in my life, little or big, and I wrapped them up tight, buried them, then ran like hell as fast as my little legs could carry me before any of it escaped and I had to deal with it.

The thing is that dope wasn’t…

So, finally, here I am in the waiting room of the Ear, Nose and Throat Doctor. I have been waiting for this appointment for 10 weeks! I have a lump in my face, somewhere around where my gums, my bicuspids and sinus cavity all get connected together and about 3

months ago, they all started a war and the right side of my mouth became the battlefield. After a series of two antibiotics, sinus x-rays, a trip to the Mengele Dental Clinic, and enough nasal spray to keep a herd of elephants breathin’ free and easy for a lifetime, I was…

Each week, I get scores of letters and emails pleading for help. Usually they are framed by circumstances and conditions intended to explain or otherwise mitigate reality’s harsh truth. While there are a lot of reasons why people get in trouble when they get high, there is only one reason they keep getting high despite those consequences. They’re addicted to alcohol or other drugs.

Only infrequently do I receive a short and to-the-point inquiry from a person in trouble who already knows they need help and isn’t looking for an easier, softer way to find it. Here’s one:

Dear Mr. Moyers: I…

“It’s different for me. I’m not really an addict/alcoholic. I’m not like those people at all. I’m just having some problems.”

How many times have I said that? Said that and believed it. I guess I’m not unique on that point, either. I work with lots of addicts and alcoholics who tell me the same thing. None of us really thought that it was really possible for us to be addicts or alcoholics.

I had long since admitted that crystal meth was a problem for me. I did crystal meth and terrible things happened. Some thing or situation would arise and I’d…

by Brenda Hiff

reviewed by Ginger Bauler

Brenda Hiff, the Director of the Hazelden Women’s Recovery Center has written a straightforward, direct yet sensitive book on issues relating specifically to women in recovery. While the tenets of the 12 step program are a solid foundation for many who choose that path, the language, written 70 years ago, reflects a period when women were not considered (or rarely considered) to be part of the community of “men” who were afflicted with the disease of Alcoholism. Times have certainly changed and I have found that often women are offended at their lack of inclusion…

By Dave Breslin

Sitting in an open field,

nice weather, feeling content.

Not very much is bothering me now,

thoughts are fairly comfortable in my head.

Thinking back on what I’ve done,

seen, with whom and how.

I realize I might be forever scarred

or then again, blessed somehow.

Maybe this constant pondering mind

is insanity, maybe genius.

Each day’s the same in this life,

what’s left that I have seen in it?

I’ve been through terror, hell, sin and hate,

whichever you might call it.

I’ve felt pleasure, love and bliss

even though it’s rare that I recall it.

I’ve felt joy and lots of pain,

mentally, physically and self inflicted

but from each and every thing I’ve…

So, here we are. It’s a Sunday night and my kid and I are having dinner. I’m enjoying some microwavable yet organic chicken and cilantro sausage, a bowl of left over boiled potatoes and zucchini loaded with Jarlsburg cheese, while my offspring eats Chef Boyardee Mini Ravioli right out of the can, while smoking a cigarette - kind of Currier and Ives, don’t you think? Anyway, we’re looking at Honda engines on his Mac, which is cause for great boredom for me, but great elation for him. And since I’m the mom, if my kid is happy then I’m happy.…

What better way to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the end of Prohibition in America than with a cold beer. That’s exactly what some of the nation’s brewers did last week to mark the end in 1933 of our 14-year failed experiment in enforced sobriety. They had a party.

“April 7th is a day to recognize the past 75 years of beer and the beer community’s contribution to Americans’ quality of life. The explosion of creativity and innovation by those who make beer is an American success story,” said Charlie Papazian, president of the Brewers Association.

Perhaps. But the end of Prohibition…

by Greg W.

I was driving into work today and listening to a guilty pleasure of mine Howard    Stern. They had Jeff Conway on from Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew and laughing  about his detox experience from the show. They would play clips of his audio and how much pain he was in. Of course all the characters on the show were cracking up and laughing about how foolish he sounded, but all I could feel is sympathy for how sick he is and the realization that he is probably going to die from this disease. It upsets me that the…

Employers soon may have to start providing employees with equal coverage for mental and physical health care if a mental health parity bill is signed into law. And while many business groups endorse the basic concept, many say they are concerned about the legislation’s potential impact on health care cost and coverage.

Lawmakers currently are hammering out a compromise proposal on mental health parity legislation that would marry elements of House and Senate bills (S. 558, H.R. 1424). If passed, the legislation would expand the Mental Health Parity Act of 1996 and require employers to offer employees the same level of…

Greg W. is twenty-four year-old in recovery from drugs and alcohol since July 15^th, 2001. In his six years of continuous sobriety he has become a public advocate for addiction recovery. With a degree in Media Production from Quinnipiac University he has combined his interests to create compelling video documentaries of other young people in recovery. His company, 4^th Dimension Productions, has goals to create powerful and inspiring resources for other young people. Through these videos and advocacy work with Connecticut Turning to Families, Greg believes that the current youth of Connecticut will soon begin to normalize sobriety at young ages, and have…

By James W.

Posture and Pretense
fade fast away -
Garments of fog
in the heat of the day.

Don’t leave me imprisoned
by the chains of approval.
Help me delight
in the pain of removal.

Each minute that passes
less becomes more.
Each waterfall crisis
splashes joy on my shore.

Kiss me with laughter
as all around me they dance;
the children of freedom
rejoice in romance.

Life… life
I’m living it now.
Blooming inside me. -
I don’t have to know how.

If you’re like most people who learn that a family member has cancer or another life-threatening illness, you instinctively react with compassion, a desire to help and support. But more often than not, family members don’t know what to do when their loved one is struggling with alcoholism or drug dependence. Some of them even go so far as to feel guilty or shameful about trying to help that person.

Dear Mr. Moyers: I am throwing everything else on the line right now because I don’t know what else to do. My father, 50, is a successful attorney in Indiana. He…